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Demystifying Cloud Integration

Many IT organizations new to cloud computing have misconceptions about integrating cloud apps with on-premise systems or other cloud solutions. Consequently, they consider integration a reason to avoid the cloud, but it doesn’t have to be.

Companies reluctant to use public cloud applications often cite perceived challenges integrating those apps with on-premise systems and other cloud applications as a leading obstacle to adoption. According to a 2012 survey conducted by Everest Group, enterprise cloud buyers ranked integration a significant barrier to their cloud computing plans.

IT organizations are often concerned cloud integration will take more time and effort than on-premise integration and, as a result, will erode the cost and speed to market benefits on which they predicate their cloud business cases, according to Daniel McManus, a senior manager with Deloitte Consulting LLP. They’re also concerned about the security of sensitive data stored in the cloud and in transit as it gets passed between different cloud-based and on-premise systems, two areas increasingly governed by corporate compliance policies and government regulation.

“Some IT organizations worry their lack of familiarity with cloud architecture and integration technologies will slow down the implementation,” says McManus. “Cloud integration isn’t inherently more difficult than on-premise integration. But for organizations just starting out with the cloud, it may require a bit more work up front as IT establishes the network and communication infrastructure components that allow a company to securely connect to the cloud and stay in compliance. Once IT has done that initial legwork, they can reuse those infrastructure components in subsequent deployments.”

John Peto, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, cautions enterprises against letting integration prevent them from moving forward with cloud computing. “IT organizations should learn to take advantage of the cloud,” he says. “Recent history shows if they don’t, individual business lines will probably adopt cloud solutions on their own.”

To address IT organizations’ cloud integration concerns and clear up misconceptions about the work involved, McManus and Peto point out the similarities and differences between integrating on-premise and cloud solutions.

The Similarities

Whether a company needs to integrate on-premise systems or cloud applications, Peto maintains the process involved is largely the same. “Integration is integration, whether or not it involves cloud apps,” he says. “Regardless of the technology a company uses, the goal of integration is to allow applications to communicate and pass data between each other.”

McManus notes that integrating on-premise and cloud solutions often requires many of the same basic steps, including designing the solution architecture; creating functional designs for various processes (such as delivering customer information from a master data file to a CRM system); creating data maps; building or enhancing the business services that are invoked by (and provide data to) business applications; and testing.

“For organizations that have established a service-oriented architecture on premise, adding public cloud components to the architecture will feel very similar to work they’ve already done,” says McManus, noting that certain applications, such as Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud, Workday, and NetSuite, are built for service-oriented architectures. “Business services that will be consumed by SaaS applications must be implemented as web services. Since many companies have already converted business services to web services, the technical challenge may be limited to confirming the web services are accessible from the cloud applications.”

Peto notes that the number, nature, and complexity of integration points often set the timeline for an implementation, regardless of whether it’s cloud-based or on-premise. “Some people presume cloud integration will take longer because it entails adding certain extra components such as for enhanced security. While it’s true that adding these components may take time, particularly for companies that have never worked with them before or lack integration maturity generally, the overall timeline still will be significantly faster than implementing an equivalent on-premise solution.” Worth noting is that remediating core legacy systems that are not ready for integration often extends the implementation timeline—whether or not the cloud is involved.

The Differences

Integrating public cloud applications with on-premise systems for the first time requires some additional work, starting with IT establishing a connection gateway framework to facilitate secure communication to and from the Internet, according to McManus. IT departments can forego this activity when solely integrating on-premise systems, which don’t need to communicate with the Internet.

IT may also choose to add an encryption gateway if corporate compliance policies or government regulations require encrypting sensitive data in the cloud, McManus adds. Encryption gateway architectures, whether custom built or from vendors such as CipherCloud, PerspecSys, or Navajo (now owned by Salesforce.com) are designed to let IT control the encryption keys while maintaining business users’ ability to search, sort, and report on encrypted data in the cloud, he says. The earliest versions of these gateway architectures were often beset by performance problems so, instead of using them, companies spent large sums of money customizing their cloud implementations to keep sensitive data fully in-house. The performance of commercial encryption gateways has recently improved. Whether bought or built, they now give companies a means of securing data in the cloud without requiring extensive customization and while preserving end users’ experience working with cloud applications and data.

There’s another important distinction between cloud integration and most of the on-premise integration companies have done to date—one that can confer additional advantages to organizations that embrace cloud integration, according to McManus. The architecture on which public cloud applications, such as Salesforce.com and Workday, are built makes it easier for companies to use off-the-shelf connectors or pre-built solutions from integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendors that provide integration functionality, says McManus. These plug-in and pre-built solutions, some of which can be deployed in hours, can greatly accelerate cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise integration. For example, they can provide for the integration of data and pre-built business process solutions, such as common data flows between CRM and ERP. Moreover, the vendors of these solutions can (and do) assume the tedious job of maintaining interfaces between applications. And because most cloud vendors have not ended support for any application program interfaces (APIs), the layer that allows cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise integration, full backwards compatibility has eased ongoing support. Nevertheless, organizations should actively monitor platform and service updates of their cloud assets, and actively manage their end-to-end integration footprint.

Integration is Integration

For decades, integration has been a capability advanced IT departments have established as a core discipline, and indeed, to take advantage of the cloud’s full potential, the discipline moves from a best practice to a necessity, according to McManus and Peto. Fortunately, once IT organizations establish the fundamental architecture for secure communication with the cloud, cloud integration will seem just like the on-premise integration they’ve always done. Of course, cloud integration may be even more efficient if they take advantage of iPaaS solutions.

“If your cloud maturity is low, you will need to factor extra time into your implementation schedule while you work out the basics,” McManus says. “But the farther you advance in your cloud maturity, the less impact integration will have on your schedule, and you may begin to see your cloud deliveries outpace your on-premise integration.”

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